Here is a great 6 minute video to show your class when covering Project Management (Chapter 3), as we watch a 30-story hotel being built in a record 15 days in the Hunan Province of China. The Los Angeles Times (March 7, 2012) describes the process and provides the video link.
Builders in China completed the 170,000 square foot, prefabricated hotel, ending on New Year’s Eve – and posted a time-lapse video (above) to show off their impressive feat.
Construction workers bolted together the new hotel from pre-made modules put together in a factory and then placed them on steel structures at the construction site. It can reportedly withstand an 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
The Chinese company behind the speedy process, Broad Sustainable Building Corporation, has some former success with building quickly. Once the world’s largest producer of air conditioning equipment, it previously built the 15-story Ark Hotel in Changsha, China, in just six days.
The implications of the latest project go beyond simply adding to the Chinese skyline in a speedy fashion. “Construction is just about the only industry that has not been exported,” one architect explained. “But now the Broad Sustainable Building Corporation has designed a system that will let them build anywhere, to construction tolerances of +/- 0.2 mm. It completely changes the way buildings are constructed and, I believe, is about to change the entire industry.”
Will this mean that American hotels will soon be added to the growing list of things that come with a “made in China” stamp?